As you work to accompany survivors on their healing journey, you may have been frustrated because they were slow to make important changes in their lives. It seems so obvious that they need to take those crucial steps, and you just can’t see why they won’t do it. You look for other words or more information to convince them, and nothing works. You start feeling like they’re working against themselves and that they really are their own enemies.

Speaking as a survivor, I can say that I’ve often been frustrated at habits that I couldn’t break, or behaviors that I knew were not healthy but couldn’t seem to stop. At times like that, we survivors may feel like we’re our own enemies, but we are not.

There were people who inflicted trauma on us, and that trauma often influences us—whether or not we realize it—to make choices that are not wise. The trauma is our enemy because it still affects us, sometimes still controls us, even though we don’t want it to.

Your job as a companion is very often to support us with prayer. If you repeatedly tell us what we need or ought to or should do, it will just beat us farther down. You can’t make us change by saying it more loudly or more often. But you can pray: Not the kind of prayers that seek to manipulate survivors into doing what you think they should do, but the prayers that seek to help them be aware of God’s loving presence. Prayers that will help them be closer to God, in whatever way is most meaningful for them.  Prayers that will lift instead of weighing them down.

If you aren’t seeing progress, and if you believe in God, then pray. Be lovingly patient, and do your part (which means that you need to be paying attention to God so you can be directed). We trust in the Lord, not in our own efforts.

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